Birmingham toll road threatens farmland

18 August 1997

Birmingham toll road threatens farmland

FARMER Ron Lewis will lose 3.24ha (eight acres) of his farm in Bridgtown, Staffordshire, if the privately financed Birmingham northern relief road, designed to reduce congestion on the M6, goes ahead.

Environmentalists are planning a legal challenge to the £400m plan to build the UKs first toll-charging motorway.

The road is scheduled to open in 2002. It will pass less than two miles from the site of a planned £1.5bn semiconductor plant on farming land at Peddimore, north of Birmingham.